On Some Relationships between Music and Painting Theodor W. Adorno; Susan Gillespie The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. | (Spring, 1995), 66-79. Stable URL htp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=( 127-4631 % 28199521 %2979%3A 1% 3C66%3AOSRBMA%3E2.0,CO%3B2-0 ‘The Musical Quarterly is currently published by Oxford University Press Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www jstor.org/joumals/oup hm. ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Wed Nov 23 08:19:40 2005On Some Relationships between Music and Painting Theodor W. Adorno Translated by Susan Gillespie For Daniel-Henry Kahnvtiler on his eightieth birthday, in profound respect and friendship! The self-evident, that music is a temporal art, that it unfolds in time, means, in the dual sense, chat time is not self-evident for it, that it hhas time as its problem. It must create temporal relationships among its constituent parts, justify their temporal relationship, synthesize them through time. Conversely, it itself must act upon time, not lose itself to it; must stem itself against the empty flood. The old aim of secular music, that of the divertissement that distracts from boredom, testifies to this, a fact that lives on in the relationship to time of autonomous music, which binds itself to time at the same time as it sets itself against it, antithetically. Here, as there, Zeitunst, the tem- poral art, is equivalent to the objectification of time. This applies to the individual events, or musical content, to the extent that they ‘come together in a context by means of the organization of their sequence, rather than dissolving as they pass away; and to the tempo- ral dimension itself, which aims, potentially, at its own self- transcendence, based on the strength of the unity of what occurs within it, following the example of certain movements of the truly symphonic Beethoven, whose virtual effect is as if they lasted only a second. If time is the medium that, as flowing, seems to resist every reification, nevertheless music's temporality is the very aspect through which it actually congeals into something that survives independently —an object, a thing, s0 to speak. What one terms musical form is therefore its temporal order. The nomenclature “form” refers the temporal articulation of music to the ideal of its spatialization.Music and Painting 67 It is no less true that painting, Raumkunst, the spatial art, as a reworking of space, means its dynamization and negation. Its idea approaches transcendence toward time. Those pictures seem the most successful in which what is absolutely simultaneous seems like a pas- sage of time that is holding its breath; this, not least, is what distin- gushes it from sculpture. That the history of painting amounts to its growing dynamization is only another way of saying the same thing. In their contradiction, the arts merge into one another. Not, however, through gradually becoming more similar, through pseudomorphosis. Music that “paints,” which nearly always suffers a loss of temporal organization, lets go of the synthesizing principle through which, alone, it assumes a form approaching space; and paint- ing that behaves dynamically, as if it were capturing temporal events, as the futurists desired and many abstract painters attempt to do with circling figures, exhausts itself, at best, in the illusion of time, while the latter is incomparably more present in a picture where it has dis- appeared among the relationships on the surface or the expression of ‘what has been painted. The moment one art imitates another, it becomes more distant from it by repudiating the constraint of its own ‘material, and falls into syncretism, in the vague notion of an undia- lectical continuum of arts in general. Busoni’s dedication “To the ‘musician in words” was a bad compliment for Rilke: it identified with deadly accuracy precisely what is bad, driveling, about the latter's poetry, which makes things all too easy for itself where the meanings of the words are concemed. The arts converge only where each pur- sues its immanent principle in a pure way. In music, even after the rejection of Wagner and the neoroman- tic principle of synaesthesia—"I hear the light"—the movement toward painting has continued among the anti-Wagnerian tendencies: proof of its subterranean staying power. The pseudomorphosis toward painting, one of the key categories for Stravinsky? and a continuation of the direction taken by Debussy, who came of age in the over- whelming shadow of the French painting of his era, must be under- stood, today, as a stage in the process of convergence. To this extent, it obeys the romantic principle against which it is rebelling, by pursu- ing the spatialization of time in a merely fictitious manner, treating time without consideration, as if it were space, with all the inconsis- tencies that characterize the magician’s act. This is also the teaching of Stravinsky's court estheticians. Today's turn makes the tendeney’s emancipation from that “as if.” It has been driven to [the point} where literal convergence arrives at the limits not only of the individ- ual arts, but of art as something antithetical to reality. Time is not